This is great! Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2016 and isn't suitable for applications outside Terminal.app. But apparently someone else took up the mantle and rebuilt it to solve those issues and published it as creep2:
> I love romeovs's creep font, but I think you could only use it well in Apple's Terminal.app because it has negative line and character width spacing, which the font requires to be spaced correctly. The root cause of this appears to be because some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box, causing most terminals to think a much bigger box is necessary for the general ASCII glyphs.
> In order to fix this issue, I manually hand painted all the glyphs from the 'creep' font in fontforge.
Awesome! I just wish creep2 added some of those sweet demo photos that are in the creep README.
2038: Fonts have subscription models. Times New Roman is a Windows exclusive and costs $12/month. There exists an open-source alternative to subscription fonts but it hasn't been updated in 2 years because the guy maintaining the repository is in jail for pirating Fast and Furious 18.
Hi everyone, quite unexpected to see this on the frontpage of Hacker News!
I made this so many years ago but I'm not using it myself anymore and I haven't been maintaining it.
I was (and am) also very inexperienced making fonts so the result was "good enough for my own limited use case" but too broken for general use, so it's good to see other people taking it and running with it, fixing my oversights and improving things.
This is fun. As I’m working on my little hobby project that is custom air quality meters I am using 128x64 screens that are about an inch on the diagonal. I ended up having to create a custom pixel font that would work for both 6pt and 8pt height plus some icons in each. It’s been a really fun experience and rewarding too.
Nitpick though -- by standard convention for terminal fonts shouldn't it be called a 5px wide font? (4px for the letterform, 1px in between.) Since they're sized according to the pixels available for each character.
I was really wondering how on earth letters would be clear with just 3px left for the letterform... :S
The $ is 5 pixel points, so I think this is a case of "px" being more of a term of art rather than actually being 4 pixels wide per letter. I think. Would appreciate clarification.
Honestly, this sucks and it renders the font useless for a lot of purposes. I wanted to use it in an embedded system, but that seems out of the question now.
> I love you all, so please use this font as much as you like for free. However, I would like to make sure you provide others the same liberty in creep's new incarnations. Therefore creep is licensed under the MIT License.
Happy it’s permissively licensed under MIT, but I wonder if the author intended to use a sticky license instead.
A sticky license includes a clause stipulating that while you can modify the code and share your modifications, any modifications must also be shared under that same license. This is usually referred to as a “share alike” clause. GPL is an example of a license like this.
There are tiny Japanese fonts that support all Chinese characters. This means they have 7000+ characters with 8x8 (or even 6x8) grid, most of which are pretty legible IMO. It's amazing.
This is really cool! I always wondered if the japanese alphabet could be rendered like this. I found the hiragana and katakana characters to be easy to read but the kanji was really hard. I'm a beginner though...
>DonHopkins on Oct 4, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you rememb...
Who can possibly forget the font that Mike Koss's "The Terminal" Apple ][ terminal emulator used to get 32 lines of 70 characters each in HIRES graphics mode in 1981? It's the most difficult to read font I've ever used regularly! (Don't try using it on a color TV, though.)
>Created for the Apple II program The Terminal. Copyright (c) 1981 Michael C. Koss
>In 1981 I wrote a terminal emulator for the Apple II. At the time, the Apple II could only display upper case characters. I used the hi-res display (280 x 192 pixels!) to display my own character set. In order to come close to showing an 80-column display, I created a truly tiny font, displaying the full ASCII character set (upper and lower case).
>I created a font within a 3x5 pixel dimension, allowing the display of 32 lines of 70 characters each. The font definitely takes some training and getting used to (especially recognition of characters that use descenders); but I found it to be quite readable after a while.
If anyone's looking for a bitmap/pixel font that covers many symbols, including all necessary powerline symbols and a large portion of the various nerd font symbols, I can't recommend Cozette[0] enough. Recently the author has began updating and releasing new versions after a hiatus. Also, if you use the otf version of the font instead of the bitmap/otb version you can still get it to look like a pixel perfect bitmap font by setting the font to a specific size in the application, usually size 9 or 9.5 depending on the app or terminal.
Readit News
https://github.com/raymond-w-ko/creep2
> I love romeovs's creep font, but I think you could only use it well in Apple's Terminal.app because it has negative line and character width spacing, which the font requires to be spaced correctly. The root cause of this appears to be because some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box, causing most terminals to think a much bigger box is necessary for the general ASCII glyphs.
> In order to fix this issue, I manually hand painted all the glyphs from the 'creep' font in fontforge.
Awesome! I just wish creep2 added some of those sweet demo photos that are in the creep README.
But it's probably possible to convert Mac fonts somehow
Out of curiosity, which ones? Did anyone find them?
I made this so many years ago but I'm not using it myself anymore and I haven't been maintaining it.
I was (and am) also very inexperienced making fonts so the result was "good enough for my own limited use case" but too broken for general use, so it's good to see other people taking it and running with it, fixing my oversights and improving things.
Questions or suggestions are more than welcome.
The readme looks so polished that I was surprised about this. Perhaps add a note to this effect at the top, maybe point to one of the forks?
Nitpick though -- by standard convention for terminal fonts shouldn't it be called a 5px wide font? (4px for the letterform, 1px in between.) Since they're sized according to the pixels available for each character.
I was really wondering how on earth letters would be clear with just 3px left for the letterform... :S
Happy it’s permissively licensed under MIT, but I wonder if the author intended to use a sticky license instead.
Misaki (8x8 pixels): https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm
k6x8 (6x8 pixels): https://littlelimit.net/k6x8.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27781606
It should include the 3x5 pixel font from Mike Koss's "The Terminal" on the Apple ][.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142258
>DonHopkins on Oct 4, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you rememb...
Who can possibly forget the font that Mike Koss's "The Terminal" Apple ][ terminal emulator used to get 32 lines of 70 characters each in HIRES graphics mode in 1981? It's the most difficult to read font I've ever used regularly! (Don't try using it on a color TV, though.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com...
>Tiny (3x5) Font
>Created for the Apple II program The Terminal. Copyright (c) 1981 Michael C. Koss
>In 1981 I wrote a terminal emulator for the Apple II. At the time, the Apple II could only display upper case characters. I used the hi-res display (280 x 192 pixels!) to display my own character set. In order to come close to showing an 80-column display, I created a truly tiny font, displaying the full ASCII character set (upper and lower case).
>I created a font within a 3x5 pixel dimension, allowing the display of 32 lines of 70 characters each. The font definitely takes some training and getting used to (especially recognition of characters that use descenders); but I found it to be quite readable after a while.
[0] https://github.com/slavfox/Cozette
So, here is comparison of minimal LCD width required to print "Hacker News" (without quotations marks):
- in Cozette: 65px
- in Creep: 54px